AWARD-WINNING PHOTOJOURNALIST AND FILMMAKER Ed Ou, who has covered the Middle East for over a decade, has worked under threat as a journalist in almost too many countries to count. Authorities in Turkey, Egypt, Somalia, Djibouti, and Bahrain have arrested or detained him at some point in his career. But he always assumed working in the United States would be safe -- until last month.

The story that follows -- first reported in The Washington Posttoday-- is a stark reminder that the US government has eviscerated press freedom and privacy rights at the border. Journalists have been stopped or detained in the past, and thousands of travelers have their electronics confiscated each year.

Ou, a Canadian citizen who is living temporarily in Canada after a long stint in Egypt, travels to the US often. He has friends and family here, and he regularly vacations and attends work events and conferences here. On October 1, he scheduled a routine flight into the country again, he told me in an interview.

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He was on assignment with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, working on a long-term project about the health care system for indigenous people in North America. As part of his reporting, he scheduled a trip to cover the protests in Standing Rock, North Dakota, where Native Americans have been protesting the building of an oil pipeline that threatens the water supply on their land.

As Ou attempted to go through security at the Vancouver International Airport for his flight to Bismarck, he was flagged for extra screening by US Customs and Border Patrol. Because he's traveled to various Middle Eastern countries over the years, he says he's often flagged when entering the US, but usually he simply explains he's a journalist and they let him go on his way.

This time was different. It all started, Ou said, when he put his Nexus card into the reader (Nexus is the Canadian equivalent of Global Entry, so he can go through security lines faster; it means he had already been vetted by customs officials.) "I got an immediate flag to go to secondary screening and I got the SSSS on my boarding pass," he told me. SSSS is the dreaded symbol that marks someone as being on some sort of list.

He was interrogated at the airport for the next seven hours, had his cell phones, personal diaries, and documents confiscated, and was denied entry to the country.

He immediately told the border agents that he was a photographer and filmmaker. He was on assignment for the CBC, he told them, but he also works for Getty Images. His photography has appeared inThe New York Times, Harper's, Time, The Guardian, and many other publications. He's coveredextremist groups and volatile political situations in a variety of countries.

"I had offered to show them press accreditation or put them in contact with my editor," he told me. "There was no doubt that they knew I was a journalist."

"The first question they asked me was 'When was the last time you were in Iraq?'" He hadn't been to Iraq in over a year, and had been back to the US many times since then without issue. "At this point in time, it's still pretty routine, since I get this all the time. My first thought was 'I'm back in the US so I don't have to hide that I'm a journalist. I don't need to be ashamed of that fact.' So I was completely straightforward and honest."

He explained to me that in the Middle East, he and his colleagues are regularly detained under false pretenses. As a result, he often attempts to downplay his profession there. In North America, he assumed, "I can proudly claim I'm a journalist and not worry about anything."

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He soon learned that was not necessarily the case. He said he was taken to a room and given a list of every country he'd visited in the past five years and told to write down everything he'd done in those countries and all the extremist groups he'd been in contact with. He explained that documenting extremists groups was often a part of his job. By now, he'd missed his flight.

"Then they asked my why I was going to Standing Rock and why I was so interested in that. They wanted to know the people I was going to meet, what I was going to cover."

Trevor Timm is a co-founder and the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He is a writer, activist, and lawyer who specializes in free speech and government transparency issues. He has contributed to The (more...)